Vasilia: the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition

In Kilistra Tomb 103 at Vasilia, in the Kyrenia district, the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition of 1955 found about 150 vessels, mostly broken and stacked in an inner chamber, and a large pithos; it also held three stone vessels¹. Many pots were believed to have been broken deliberately at burial^1,2. Kilistra was one of two localities, with Kafkallia, where the expedition dug Philia-stage cemeteries on the hills behind the north-coast plain^2,3.

The 1955 season

J. R. Stewart directed the expedition for the University of Melbourne, with his wife Eve Stewart as co-excavator^3,4. Their avowed aims were to clarify the origins of the Early Bronze Age in Cyprus and to acquire Cypriote antiquities for the Nicholson Museum and to reward sponsors; they planned to receive a share of the finds and also bought from licensed dealers⁴. Stewart also wanted to settle whether Philia was a precursor of the first phase of the Early Bronze Age or a regional style coexisting with developments elsewhere, a question on which he and Dikaios disagreed². Vasilia was a site he had chosen eighteen years earlier, a large and heavily pilfered cemetery like Vounous².

The dig needed permission from the Department of Antiquities and the agreement of the landowners². Andreas Stylianou, a friend of the Stewarts, agreed to work at Vasilia, and his family's house served as their base². Work began on 17 October 1955². Tombs were planned and photographed step by step, and the work went fast with picks, shovels and buckets; pots set in compacted earth were hard to extract intact². Many tombs proved to have been looted². A foreman, Tryphon, was sent out to find tombs, and his late find of the largely unlooted Kilistra Tomb 103 brought the best results². By 27 October Vasilia had been declared a washout, and the Stewarts, who had obtained permits in a single day, were digging at Nicosia-Ayia Paraskevi as well, shuttling between the two sites². The last month went on cataloguing finds at the Kumarcilar Khan².

The tombs

Stewart cleared five chamber tombs of unexpectedly developed form, some of them rectangular, with long dromoi³. All but one chamber had been looted; the unlooted one had a second inner chamber on the axis of the dromos³. Eve Stewart was told by a local woman that herders threw sherds into a tomb through a hole in its roof, which made it next to impossible to be sure that pottery belonged to the tomb where it was found².

Webb and Frankel list the tombs as Kafkallia Tombs 1 to 3 and Kilistra Tombs 101, 103 and 104, each with a long narrow dromos and a buttress at the back of the chamber, with plaster linings, pebble paving and transverse walls in some dromoi; the pottery is mainly Red Polished Philia¹. In Kafkallia Tomb 1, nine metal objects lay beneath the plaster floor of the dromos, close together as though in a bag: three ring-ingots, a spearhead with a bent blade, a knife, two toggle pins, a razor or knife fragment and a rivet⁵. A picrolite lid and pounder came from the same dromos¹. Webb, Frankel, Stos and Gale attribute the metal to the Philia horizon, about 2400 to 2300 BC, and argue that the deposit is a cache of concealed items, not grave goods⁵. They note that about 15 per cent by number of provenanced Philia metal comes from a handful of looted Vasilia tombs⁵. Megaw's 1955 notice reports a group of bronzes from a dromos with a dagger with an Early Cypriot tang and three heavy rings, possibly armlets or vessel stands³.

Kilistra Tomb 103 held three stone vessels, described as alabaster: a large flat-based bowl (No. 3) and a jug (No. 4) from Chamber I, and fragments of a smaller bowl (No. 55) from Chamber II⁶. Stewart called the bowl and jug alabaster and thought them imports; Webb and Frankel imply local manufacture, and Merrillees, citing the geologist Xenophontos's identification of the material as gypsum, favours imports from the Nile Valley⁶.

Dating and meaning

Stewart saw the Philia culture as contemporary with the earliest phase of the Vounous cemetery and as not the source of the Vounous culture³. He suspected that Vasilia owed its importance to the copper trade, as a likely land terminal of a copper route and perhaps the main export centre, with a harbour and a pass to the Ovgos valley^2,3. Stewart assigned the tombs to the end of the third millennium BC⁶. In 1957 Megaw linked a Philia-stage settlement found by the Catling-Nicolaou survey at Vasilia to the tombs Stewart had excavated⁷. Webb and colleagues note that Vasilia has no documented occupation from the following Early Cypriot period, and suggest that its abandonment may be related to the burial of the hoards, which they link to socio-economic insecurity⁵.

Dividing the finds

Dikaios arrived on 18 December for the division of finds². Cyprus kept the one good Vasilia tomb, with the large alabaster bowl, and the largest Ayia Paraskevi tomb; the Stewarts were offered a tomb group from the Cyprus Museum's own collection as compensation². About 30 pots from Gladstone Street tombs in Nicosia were given by the Department of Antiquities to Stewart as compensation for the quantity of pots in Tomb 103, as Eve Stewart noted in her copy of the final report⁴. The three stone vases of Tomb 103 are now in the Cyprus Museum storeroom⁶. Pottery sherds from the Kafkallia Tomb 1 chamber were delivered to the Nicholson Museum by Hennessy in June 1973⁶.

For Kafkallia Tomb 1 the published catalogue runs to No. 34, but Stewart's Object and Pottery Register has no card above No. 3, and no in situ plan of the looted chamber was made⁶. The final report, edited by Hennessy, Eriksson and Kehrberg, appeared in 1988⁶.